A Slow War On Human Trafficking

By JULIA C. MEAD

Published: May 28, 2006

FOR at least three years, the United States Department of Justice has identified Long Island as one of 21 regions across the country where trafficking in human beings -- abducting or coercing people, usually illegal immigrants, into a kind of indentured servitude -- is rampant. In 2005, the Justice Department awarded more than $1 million in grant money to combat the problem in Nassau and Suffolk.

But more than a year after the Long Island Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force was organized, not one trafficker operating on Long Island has been arrested, and just one victim, a Chinese woman forced to work in a Wantagh brothel that was disguised as a massage parlor, has been freed from traffickers.

Officials of the task force offered a variety of explanations for what they acknowledged were scant results on Long Island. Trafficking investigations are complex and time-consuming, they said, and they depend on testimony from victims who are terrified of the police. That the New York criminal code includes no statute specifically aimed at human trafficking further complicates their efforts, they said.

So the task force has spent the last year training police officers, sharing intelligence and fine-tuning mechanisms for amassing evidence, the officials said. ''I do expect that there are big cases coming soon,'' said Demetri M. Jones, an assistant United States attorney and the chairwoman of the task force.

In addition to the Justice Department, the task force includes three other federal agencies -- the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Homeland Security Department, and the Labor Department -- and the State Department of Labor, the Nassau and Suffolk police departments and district attorney's offices, and two private organizations, Safe Horizon and Catholic Charities.

Each of the county police departments got $360,000 from the federal government last year for training. Catholic Charities, which helps victims gain legal residency and find jobs and housing, and Safe Horizon, a New York City-based national organization that trains nongovernmental agencies to assist victims, received grants totaling about $400,000 for their efforts.

Just how big is the problem they are trying to combat? Florrie Burke, a senior director at Safe Horizon, responded to the question with a deep sigh. ''We don't know for sure,'' she said. ''And that's true anywhere.''

Ms. Burke said Long Island is a natural location for human trafficking because of its proximity to New York City, where a number of cases have been documented, and to the airports and seaports where immigrants arrive.

''But it's all supposition, and that's what all locations are, until you find a real case,'' she said.

Safe Horizon did find one case on Long Island, but it was in 2001, long before the task force was formed. The group's tip to federal authorities eventually led to the arrests in June 2004 of Mariluz Zavala and her husband, Jose Ibanez, who pleaded guilty last winter to federal crimes including conspiring to obtain forced labor. They are now in prison.

Prosecutors said the couple charged would-be immigrants up to $13,000 each to be smuggled into the country from Peru using phony tourist visas, and then forced them to live in cramped, squalid conditions in houses in Coram, Brentwood and Amityville and to hand over their passports and almost all their earnings, under the threat of being turned in to immigration officials.

Despite the precedent of that case and the rapid growth of Long Island's Hispanic immigrant population, county police officials said their efforts are concentrated mostly on massage-parlor brothels run by and employing Asians. Nassau has raided two dozen in the past year; Suffolk has raided eight.

''We're cleaning up the community,'' said Capt. Steven Skrynecki, the Nassau police representative on the task force. ''And while we're doing that, a secondary motive is to look for and rescue the victim.''

As a result of those raids, police officials contend that a majority of human trafficking victims on Long Island are young Asian women who are forced to live in unhealthy conditions, work long hours and surrender all or most of their earnings.

By their very nature, they cannot be counted with any accuracy. But private groups estimate that as many as several hundred people may be laboring under duress or in captivity in Nassau and Suffolk, working in restaurants and sweatshops, on farms, as house cleaners or as prostitutes.

The one victim that the task force has rescued is a 37-year-old woman from China, where the government generally penalizes couples who have more than one child. The woman, who asked to be identified only by her nickname, Tracy, because she fears retaliation, said she fled China in May 2000, leaving behind her husband and son, after government officials forced her to abort her second child and undergo sterilization.

''I had nowhere else to go,'' she said in an interview, aided by a police interpreter.